In his 20 years as a Navy SEAL, Rob Roy participated in missions that took him all over the globe.

Bosnia. Somalia. Haiti.

Not to mention the many destinations he is not allowed to mention. And when he returned home after another round of doing what he calls “cool SEAL stuff,” he came toting the kind of baggage a guy can feel good about.

Pride. Patriotism. Accomplishment in the face of great odds.

After Roy traveled to South Africa as part of Animal Planet’s “Battleground: Rhino Wars” reality TV show, however, the San Diegan came back with something new. When Roy joined a group of fellow SEAL veterans (and one Green Beret) to help protect rhinos from deadly poachers, he left with a mission, but he came back with a calling.

“In the military, you don’t necessarily know why you’re on a mission. You don’t see the impact,” said Roy, who retired from the Navy in 2005.

“This is something where I can say I engaged myself and I gave 100 percent, and I can see an impact. I can tell my kids and my grandkids that awareness changed and the rhino population increased, and I know I had some part in that.”

In the Animal Planet miniseries, the “Rhino Wars” team — which also includes team leader Craig “Saw” Sawyer, sniper Jeff Biggs and an active-duty medic who goes by the code name “Oz” — spent nearly seven weeks last summer in Kruger National Park. In this reserve, the team worked with an anti-poaching security company to battle the men who slaughter rhinos for their valuable horns.

But while Saw, Oz and Biggs drove through the dark South African night looking for armed-and-dangerous men and trying to avoid potentially dangerous lions, elephants and rhinos, Roy was in the villages and marketplaces looking for something equally frightening: the root of the poaching problem.

As the team member in charge of intelligence, Roy was tasked with infiltrating the poaching network with the hope of finding out which of the bad guys were the bad guys in charge. He assumed multiple identities, courted village leaders, met with informants who may or may not have been on his side, and crossed paths with poaching kingpins who were definitely not on his side.

It was the work he was trained to do, and frankly, it was still pretty scary.

“People were being killed around us. They were killed by animals and by poachers. There was real danger there, and I was in danger most of the time,” said the 50-year-old Roy, a big man whose deep voice and imposing physique makes him a formidable presence on- and off-screen. “But I guess one of my biggest fears was having my family see it and say, ‘You did what?’”

Perhaps they shouldn’t be shocked, given that Roy’s military career got started because of a TV show.

As a boy growing up in Milwaukee, Roy fell hard for the camaraderie and high-jinks he used to see on Bob Hope’s many Christmas-with-the-troops holiday TV specials. After graduating from high school in 1980, the guy who thought being a sailor meant “having fun and partying all the time,” found himself in the Navy and training at the Naval Training Center in San Diego.

His partying dreams died a quick boot-camp death, but Roy’s enthusiasm was made of sturdier stuff. He served on the aircraft carrier Nimitz for two years, and by 1987, he was in SEAL training in San Diego. That’s where he met Sawyer.

A few decades and many secret missions later, Sawyer called his SEAL buddy and asked him to consider joining the “Rhino Wars” team.

Roy didn’t think of himself as a conservationist or an animal lover, but a SEAL can’t say no to a challenge. At least not this SEAL. And after the challenge came the surprise.

“To go to South Africa and see the animals in their natural habitat, it makes a huge difference,” said Roy, who runs the SOT-G Corp. consulting business and lives in Coronado with his wife and two children. “It’s not about us, and it’s not about Animal Planet. It’s about how we can send a message so that people are aware. It’s not just about rhinos. It’s about how we abuse our guardianship of the planet.”

At the moment, “Battleground: Rhino Wars” is just a three-episode miniseries. But if Animal Planet wanted Roy to return to the rhino killing fields, he would do it. Because when his calling calls, Rob Roy figures he’d better answer.

“If it becomes my calling to be an environmentalist, I would do it. We did stop some poaching, and we arrested a few people and found out about their networks. We had an opportunity to make a differences, and I hope we did.”